It wasn’t the taped-together cover, nor the fuzzy orange ovals floating in a darker orange ether, nor even the giant black-and-white close-up of fork tongs and their shadows that made me so sad. It was my own happiness. Which is absurd because if I can’t be happy when I’m happy, when can I be happy?

[Ceyda just called and said we can’t watch any films tonight because Leili doesn’t want to, so I said, “Maybe we can put plays on for each other,” only Ceyda heard, “Maybe we can put pastries on each other,” which I in turn heard as “put pasties on each other,” pasties being a word that Ceyda, who is Turkish, doesn’t know, so I explained it to her.]

After listening to the final song, Sing Swan Song (did you know – I just looked this up – that swans sing some exquisite song as they die, thus the expression swan song?), I realized that the song list is a map, each song a stop along a route you laid out. Or that’s what it felt like to listen, a full day between songs, and that too is why it was heartbreaking: because I want to live (I typed love) in that place (a place forever down the road?) and never leave. I’m reminded of the songlines – vast labyrinths of invisible pathways preserved in the form of songs. It’s a bit much when speaking of a mix CD, but who knows what our descendants will be into and anyway the thing rocked.